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Dave_B
23-Jun-2007, 15:28
Folks:
Does anyone know anything about Ica lenses? My search has turned up very little. I have an Ica Dresden Litonar Anastigmat f6.8 12cm lens mounted in a Compur dial shutter. It came with a very cute Century Graphic camera I just got. Any ideas about IC, quality, etc.? Ica is not even listed as a lens manufacturer in any of my sources. I know they made cameras, did they make their own lenses or did they source them from someone else?
Thanks,
Dave B.

Glenn Thoreson
23-Jun-2007, 17:10
Probably made by Zeiss or Goerz. Shoot some film and see what it looks like. You may be pleasantly surprised.

Donald Qualls
23-Jun-2007, 19:54
Ica was a member of the 1926 merger that formed Zeiss-Ikon (along with Contessa-Nettel, C. P. Goerz, and some company with Zeiss in the name); it's very possibly they bought their lenses from Zeiss or Goerz prior to 1926, but there were a lot of other lens makers in the WWI era when that lens was likely made that vanished by the end of the 1920s (the Weimar Republic's terrible inflation was pretty hard on optical manufacturers -- well, and pretty much everything else).

FWIW, the only Ica camera I own came to me with a Compur shutter and CZJ Tessar that I have no reason to think isn't original (it's an Ideal and the shutter has a factory applied Ideal bayonet mount) -- but it's clearly marked CZJ. Your lens, marked as ICA, is a little bit of a puzzle. I've never seen a lens with that marking, but it was also pretty common, even much later, for a camera maker to buy lenses as loose elements, mount them in cells, and mark them with their own name, even though there wasn't a pound of unfinished optical glass anywhere in the place.

Maybe if we all sit and look expectant, Ole will happen by... ;)

Ole Tjugen
24-Jun-2007, 03:58
All I can find is that it's a 4 elments in 4 groups (read: Dialyte or similar), and it was possibly made by O. Simon of Dresden.

Dave_B
24-Jun-2007, 15:55
I shot some Polaroids with it today. The claim I found in the Vade Mecum is that it covers 58 degrees suggesting an IC of 134mm. Not too surprising as it was apparently designed as a MF lens. I was pleased to find that looking at the images, it covers 4x5 nicely without too much light fall off. I shot at f16. B&W shots were decently crisp in the center. The edges of the image in the long direction (5 inches) lose sharpness ever so slightly but in a fairly pleasing way. It was reasonably sharp to the edges along the short direction. I put it on my 8x10 and it vignettes at an IC of~200mm. The color shots were a little too green for my taste. I also shot some color chromes (Velvia) to see if it was my Polaroid film. It will be a while until I send a batch of chromes off to the lab for processing. For a small lens (116 grams in a Compur dial shutter, filter size ~26.5mm), it is not too bad for B&W images. The jury is still out on color but I don't expect much. My copy was probably made sometime around 1925.
Cheers,
Dave B.